Laundromathics (UnReal)

A Guide To Clean Clothing, And Why It's So Rare

Author: Kirrily Brooke Robert
Date: 1995/09/20
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Anyone who has moved out of home and no longer has parents to clean their clothes will most likely be mystified by the bizarre phenomenon that is... LAUNDRY.

Now, once and for all, we here at PGG enterprises attempt to clarify some of the weirdness that occurs between the time that your clothes hit the floor in a dirty heap, and the time that they return clean and freshly ironed to your cupboard, drawers, or (in my case at least) back to the floor.

Scientific observation, and lack of sleep, enabled our intrepid researchers to determine the following universal laws of laundry:

THE FIRST LAW OF LAUNDRY:
There is always one odd sock. Sometimes the laundry will eat one of your socks; sometimes it will regurgitate one that once belonged to some other poor laundry victim. This is an application of L-Space (Laundry-space, not Library-space as certain fantasy/humour authors would have it) -- all laundries, everywhere in the universe, are connected on a fundamental level by wormholes in the fabric of L-Space. Socks travel through these wormholes, and if you have any doubt that socks are capable of travelling under their own steam you obviously do your laundry far too often.

THE SECOND LAW OF LAUNDRY:
Colour only travels in one direction. The colour in a bright red pair of socks will happily travel into your white shirts, but the same dye will not budge from the white shirt no matter what you do. A corollary of this law is that colour travels at a speed directly proportional to it's density, where density is not only calculated according to the number of dye molecules per unit of volume, but in fact by the formula

             n p
            -----

v

where n is the number of dye molecules, v is the volume, and p is a number representing how putrid the colour is. This is why red clothing runs more often than blue.

THE THIRD LAW OF LAUNDRY:
The likelihood that your laundry will be done is inversely proportional to the square of the urgency with which you need the clothing.

After much thought, our researchers further surmised that a laundry is, in fact, a perfect example of Schroedinger's famous thought-experiment with a cat. The experiment, intended to show the nature of quantum probability, originally involved a cat which was neither alive nor dead, but existed in an indeterminate state until the box was opened. Similarly, ones laundry exists in a state of quantum improbability, where one cannot tell whether ones laundry will be finished until one opens the machine.

Purists will note that Schroedinger's cat only worked because the probability of it being in either state was exactly 50/50. However, there is no good way to tell exactly what the probability of your laundry being done is -- this conforms to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle of Laundry, whereby you cannot tell what state your laundry is in without affecting that state. We all know that opening the machine during a cycle will stop the cycle and make it impossible to observe both where the laundry is and where it is going at the same time. So to all extents and purposes the probabilities may as well be even, and we can assume that they just damn well are, all right?

Advanced students may be wondering at this point whether there is any point in doing laundry at all. We can only recommend that you leave it to the experts (you know, that one in the apron who was always around the place before you moved out of home), or just keep buying more clothes.